On Proportionality

Reports of Biden’s apparent efforts to restrain Israel’s response to the recent ballistic missile attack often bring up the term “proportionality.” It’s a curious word.

In International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the like, which I regard as utopian, the term is invoked to argue that military force can be used, but it must be “proportional.” Otherwise, it is illegal and unethical. Of course, a key problem with IHL is that proportionality is in the eye of the beholder. Who’s to say what is proportional and what is not? As the word is invoked when discussing possible Israeli responses, the meaning seems to be something akin to a response that equals the original act of aggression. You hit me. I hit you back with the same force. That way, the theory goes, I get the satisfaction of hitting back without running the risk of escalation. If I hit you back as hard as you hit me, but no more, it is an invitation for you to hit me back but only with the same force. Perhaps we might then continue to trade blows. But we avoid making the situation worse. That’s the theory.

There are several problems with this. One, which I introduced last week, is that proportionality is best thought of in terms of proportional to what’s at stake. If you steal my candy, who cares? Should I break your nose over a Snickers bar? No. If you steal my child, well, that’s a whole different story. The definition of proportional shifts.

I strongly believe that this is something many observers of the Middle East, and not just inveterate critics of Israel, miss. For example, I’ve read many criticisms that point to America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as proof that “there is no military solution,” because the U.S. failed to achieve a military solution in either war. The thing is that neither of those wars really was important to the United States. There was not that much at stake. So, yes, we dropped a lot of bombs. But we never thought it necessary to go “all out” and destroy our enemies in either country. We could have. We could have killed all of them and levelled the countries that backed them. We did nothing of the sort. The stakes were not high enough. Afghan and Iraqi insurgents never posed a real threat to the United States. Proof: We walked away from Afghanistan, calculating that it just was not worth it to us to persist, and there was no real call to double down.

We abandoned Afghanistan because we could; too little was at stake to keep at it or try harder

The opposite was true in the Second World War, when President Roosevelt, backed by the American public, thought it appropriate to do whatever it took to win, even if that meant rooting out Japanese infantry cave by cave, never mind the high cost in American lives; leveling German and Japanese cities; and, ultimately, dropping atomic bombs. We killed thousands of French civilians prior to the Normandy invasion just to damage the French rail network and impede the Germans’ ability to move troops to the invasion zone. To my knowledge, everyone thought it was necessary. Even the French tend not to talk about what we did to them, precisely because they understand it to have been necessary. The suffering was justified. Until recently, the Germans didn’t talk about what we did to their cities, either. Books on the subject, like Jörg Friederich’s The Fire, date to this century, not before.

Caen, 1944. We, together with the British and Canadians, blew northern France to pieces, killing thousands. Proportional?

Of course, IHL did not exist then. However, I suspect that even if it did, Americans’ understanding of proportionality would have condoned the extreme violence we meted out on the Germans and Japanese. It is fashionable for some people today to fret that we committed war crimes in those wars. Those people were extremely rare in 1941-1945, if they existed at all. I’d go so far as to argue that concern with the ethical imperative of the post-war legal notion of “proportionality” is a luxury to be enjoyed by nations with little at stake in what mostly are wars of choice. So no, the wars in Gaza and Lebanon are not like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, because unlike America in those wars, for Israel a great deal is at stake. What was proportional in Afghanistan and Iraq is not the same thing as in Israel’s conflict with Iran and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Frankfurt, 1944 or 1945. Friedrich estimated that 70,000 German children died in the Allied bombings. Proportional?

The second problem has to do with the whole logic behind the use of force in a conflict. The basic idea in war is to seek “decision.” To do something that makes one’s victory all but assured. Theorists from Carl von Clausewitz to Ferdinand Foch thought of that in terms of destroying the enemy’s ability to fight, such that one can impose one’s will on them. Hitting someone back with precisely the same force that they hit you does not achieve decision. Trading blows in a tit-for-tat struggle also does not achieve decision. It prolongs the conflict, which then becomes one of attrition. Wars of attrition often go to the side that can withstand the most pain. In that case, a death cult like Hamas is sure to win. Hamas does not care how many people die. So much the better, if the deaths can be filmed and disseminated in all their gruesomeness over the internet. Hamas seeks decision in the public sphere.

Decision in warfare can be achieved in many ways, but often it just boils down to this: if someone hits you, you hit them back with so much force that one has, in effect, won not just this fight but the next. One seeks to end one’s enemy’s ability to do you any harm, at least not any time soon. Some might object that eventually one’s enemy will get back on its feet and seek vengeance. That is true. However, human history is long, and to expect a “final solution” that ends a conflict forever is to aspire to end history. That’s messianism. Maybe when we attain warp drive, the Vulcans will come and teach us to transcend our divisions. Alternatively, one can aspire to genocide, which no one counsels.

Insisting on “proportional” responses to Iran serves only to avoid escalation, but that means avoiding decision. Which means prolonging a conflict and ensuring that there will be more fighting soon. That is precisely what happened when the “international community” forced Israel to call a halt to its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. The net result of ending that fight was only to enable Hezbollah to grow in strength and acquire ever more precise and destructive Iranian weapons. The present war in Lebanon is a direct consequence of past calls for proportionality. Likewise, the present war in Gaza is a direct result of Israel’s failure to follow through in the few times in conducted land incursions into the territory following its withdrawal in 2005. Under intense international pressure and fear of suffering casualties, Israel contented itself with a proportionality dictated by others who had their own interests at heart. And here we are today.

Today I read that Israel assured the Biden Administration it would not hit Iran particularly hard. It will respond “proportionately,” defined, it seems, in a way intended not to trouble the U.S. elections. I don’t see the point, and think Israel should focus instead on seeking decision against Hamas and Hezbollah if it is not inclined to hit Iran hard enough to make a real difference. Or maybe just wait until after the November election. That would mean, however, postponing decision. Is that what’s best?